PRO BASKETBALL; Black Coaches In N.B.A. Have Shorter Tenures

By DAVID LEONHARDT and FORD FESSENDEN

Published: March 22, 2005

Correction Appended

The men coaching N.B.A. teams in recent seasons have looked like no other group of head coaches in the history of major American professional sports. Today, 10 of the league's 30 coaches are black, ranging from young former players like Terry Porter in Milwaukee to veterans of multiple coaching jobs like Bernie Bickerstaff in Charlotte.

At a time when the National Football League can count only 10 black head coaches in its history, the National Basketball Association has reached a position rare for any business: when a black coach or executive is hired or fired, almost nobody mentions race. Opportunity in the N.B.A. appears to have become color blind.

But the coaches who have received those opportunities have not had much time to enjoy them. In a pattern that has gone largely unnoticed, except among black coaches themselves, white coaches have been holding on to their jobs for significantly longer than black coaches. Yesterday, the Cleveland Cavaliers fired Paul Silas, who was in his second season with the team.

Over the last decade, black N.B.A. coaches have lasted an average of just 1.6 seasons, compared with 2.4 seasons for white coaches, according to a review of coaching records by The New York Times. That means the typical white coach lasts almost 50 percent longer and has most of an extra season to prove himself.

This month alone, three of the six black coaches who had held their jobs for more than a season have been fired, including Silas, who had eight years of N.B.A coaching experience before joining Cleveland. The Orlando Magic dismissed Johnny Davis last Thursday after less than two seasons. On March 2, the Portland Trail Blazers fired Maurice Cheeks, then the black coach with the second-longest tenure; he had lasted almost four seasons.

''Our white counterparts are given more the benefit of the doubt,'' Silas said in an interview in January. ''Things have changed dramatically in our society, but it still has a long way to go.''

The gap has created a deep division among coaches and executives, one that splits largely but not exclusively along racial lines. Some, including Commissioner David Stern, said the numbers surprised them and called them largely a coincidence. Doc Rivers, the coach of the Boston Celtics, who is black, said he thought that owners and general managers now gave white and black coaches equal chances to succeed.

The league, some people said, is simply too competitive for race to affect executives.

''I believe that right now each coaching decision is based on a fierce determination made by the owner and general manager that they want to win -- and that that decision has become color blind,'' Stern said. He called the league ''the best example of equal-opportunity employment, even if against the judgment of perfection it isn't there yet.''

The contrast in tenures might be most easily seen among coaches with the greatest longevity. Of the 14 N.B.A. coaches who have held jobs for at least five seasons since 1989, only one has been black -- Lenny Wilkens, in Atlanta, from 1993 to 2000 -- despite the fact that teams began to hire black coaches in large numbers in the late 1980's. The three active N.B.A. coaches with the longest tenure are all white, and they have been in place for about a decade on average.

The pattern holds in almost any important category of coaches. Winning black coaches have been replaced sooner than winning white coaches on average, and experienced black coaches have served shorter tenures than experienced white coaches. The same is true among losing coaches, among rookie coaches and among coaches who played in the N.B.A. and those who did not.

Minding the Tenure Gap

Black N.B.A. coaches and executives said they were proud that the league was one of just a handful of organizations to have turned over a large share of leadership jobs to minorities. They added that the situation was continuing to improve. But they also said they had long noticed the difference in coaching tenures, despite the lack of attention it has received and the speed with which many of those same coaches found new jobs.

''Does race have anything to do with this? Now I'm sure the people who do the hiring say no,'' said Al Attles, an assistant general manager of the Golden State Warriors, who in 1969 became the third black coach in N.B.A. history and later won a championship. ''But it surely has to be something more than wins and losses. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, eventually you have to say it's a duck.''

Even if the cause was rarely conscious racism, coaches said, age-old athletic stereotypes -- the black athlete as a prodigal talent and white athlete as hard-working gym rat -- can make blacks seem particularly unsuited to be good teachers. Some black coaches said they thought that team owners and general managers, a largely white group, were probably most at ease with people similar to them, just as most people were.

And players, both black and white, are still far more accustomed to seeing whites in positions of authority than blacks, coaches said. Some black coaches, including Cheeks in Portland and Byron Scott with the Nets, lost their jobs after clashing with a black player.

With any individual coaching change, the effect of race is almost impossible to perceive and may in fact be wholly absent. Black coaches were hesitant to point to specific examples.

Correction: March 23, 2005, Wednesday
A chart in the sports pages yesterday of the longest-tenured coaches hired in the National Basketball Association in the last 15 years, with an article about the comparatively shorter tenures of black coaches, misstated the period that Jeff Van Gundy was head coach of the New York Knicks. It was March 1996 to December 2001, not 1995 to 2002.